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SETI@home is in hibernation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

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Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#91

Post by wvoch235 »

SECProto wrote: post #70
hot_gril wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, cryptocurrency stuff is the closest I've ever felt today to the spirit of the old internet.

> cryptocurrency stuff is the closest I've ever felt today to the spirit of the old internet Cryptocurrency feels like the exact opposite of the old internet to me - it feels like a bunch of anonymous bros looking for the next sucker to scam out of money and get rich quick.

The nature of the scam has evolved, and possibly the parties involved have changed, but the scams were always there.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#92

Post by nonagono »

Breza wrote: post #82

I have a tangential question. I remember distributed processing being a "next big thing" back in the day. The idea was that a company could run complex operations by borrowing some power from all their employee's computers. Seti@home proved the concept was possible. So what happened? Why can't I train a random forest across all the computers currently logged into my company's VPN?

It's just not worth it. Writing programs in a distributed fashion is hard, setting up compute servers on employee machines is awkward, and few companies actually need to run large compute jobs. So while it's in theory possible, the non-compute costs of doing this would eat up any compute savings.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#93

Post by moralestapia »

recuter wrote: post #84
latchkey wrote: post #74

This makes me sad because it reminds me of something similar I just went through. For the last few years, I've been running >120k gpus to mine ETH. Before we turned them off after ETH switched to PoS, I tried really hard to find an alternative workload for them. A large number of the GPUs were based on the PS5 chip, which is an APU (CPU+GPU) and ran as blade computers. It is actually a pretty power efficient chip, bu…

> The problem was finding funding to pay for the operating expenses, megawatts of power, so it never got off the ground and the hardware has been turned off and decommissioned. Such a bummer. You ran 120,000 graphics card to mine ETH and didn't end up with lambos or like... ether.. to donate to the professor along with the hardware?

Yeah, that's either a typo or bull ... or maybe one of the top 5 ETH miners is among us.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#94

Post by Freebytes »

xtracto wrote: post #77
rurp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were based on open ended tooling that anyone interested could experiment freely with, I would feel the same. Unfortunately these giant LLMs are almost the complete opposite of that.

I was just thinking that it would be great to do something like seti@home but for an open libre super LLM: Install a client that would help run / train the huge llm and you get Access to the network to do queries. Kind of how napster/Kazaa were at their time. I would love to work on doing something like that.

That is actually a great idea. One of the issues with a network, however, is how the output would be produced in such a scenario and how the dictionary would be controlled and how the training data could be managed. The transformer model allows different RNNs to be separated, but it would be challenging to 'put it all together'. Furthermore, bad actors could intentionally poison the network during the training process.

Furthermore, how would upgrades work? When new techniques are discovered, it would be hard to upgrade it. We see these challenges already when it comes to major changes in cryptocurrency networks.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#95

Post by ETH_start »

porknubbins wrote: post #69
_yb2s wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power and cooling were at fixed levels and computers couldn’t really sleep, so cpu cycles were just wasted without seti@home. Nowadays computers idle efficiently, so something like that would make your computer louder and more expensive to run.

I’m probably about median age for HN and when I was looking into folding Seti@home I had no idea and didn’t worry about power cost because it was subsidised by my parents or university. Plus energy was cheaper then. Now as an adult seeing a month of a few GPUs running on the utility bill really hurts.

The fact that energy hasn't gotten more affordable really demonstrates a deficiency of planning.

We've had access to a source of energy that is cheap, zero-carbon and essentially limitless, since the 1950s: nuclear power.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#96

Post by recuter »

yieldcrv wrote: post #88
recuter wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem was finding funding to pay for the operating expenses, megawatts of power, so it never got off the ground and the hardware has been turned off and decommissioned. Such a bummer. You ran 120,000 graphics card to mine ETH and didn't end up with lambos or like... ether.. to donate to the professor along with the hardware?

anybody running them would have the same operational costs, probably far higher since miners gravitate to the lowest cost power source

He couldn't even donate 120 out of the 120k cards and one lambo? I'm beginning to think this whole crypto thing is sus

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#97

Post by KerrAvon »

porknubbins wrote: post #69
_yb2s wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power and cooling were at fixed levels and computers couldn’t really sleep, so cpu cycles were just wasted without seti@home. Nowadays computers idle efficiently, so something like that would make your computer louder and more expensive to run.

I’m probably about median age for HN and when I was looking into folding Seti@home I had no idea and didn’t worry about power cost because it was subsidised by my parents or university. Plus energy was cheaper then. Now as an adult seeing a month of a few GPUs running on the utility bill really hurts.

Solar panels.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#98

Post by pmarreck »

cypress66 wrote: post #75
chungy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin has nothing to do with "cracking SHA256 hashes", for what it's worth. The only thing remotely related is how it brute-forces inputs until it generates hashes that begin with a certain number of bits set to 0.

> hashes that begin with a certain number of bits set to 0. This myth was always intriguing to me. Where does it come from? It's not a number of 0s (which would imply difficulty could only be doubled or halved), it's just finding a hash that is less than the target.

"Less than the target" in effect is "more leading zeroes" depending on how low the target is. But the lower, the more leading zeros, Right?

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#99

Post by pmarreck »

does it have anything to do with the fact that the USG has basically said "UFO's are real", and since UFO's were always real (in the sense that I'm sure there were always some kind of "flying object" that was "unidentifiable"), this is in effect a tacit admittance that they are probably extraterrestrially piloted? >..<

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#100

Post by pmarreck »

cbozeman wrote: post #90
SkyMarshal wrote: post #15

It seems the aliens are already here, so not much need for SETI anymore. More seriously though, it appears there was some unresolved difficulty in searching and analyzing the data returned from the network, to the point the scientists working on it gradually threw in the towel and moved on to other projects. https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85996 https://einsteinathome.org/content/can-we-run-setiho…

Yeah. They are. https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2023... The only time a senior DOD / military official uses the word "possible" is when it's either happened or is going to happen. "It's possible you guys will be deployed within the next year." means "You guys are going to be deployed sometime within the next year."

I'm a veteran, can confirm this language.

In fact, the weirdest thing to me about the announcement was that... nobody cared. And yet, this made sense, because...

Wildly speculating, I think there's been a big systematic desensitization program going on due to that being effective against phobias (such as this one, which I'll call "astroxenophobia"): https://www.healthline.com/health/systematic-desensitization

If the announcement made last year was instead made in, say, 1987... actually, no matter how true, no such announcement would have ever been made in 1987 because either the announcer would have had to resign in disgrace or we might have had a good chance for public pandemonium.

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